Mercy

by J L Aarne

  They said she took on customers as johns, though conveniently, a real john had never been named. She fucked them in the men’s room, in the alley out back, in their parked cars; Ezra had even heard that his mother took them lined up for a turn at the bar like it was happy hour. Isaac didn’t talk much, not even to him, but he knew it was the same for him; he heard it, too.

  YUR MOM’S A SLUT!

  Some asshole—or group of assholes—had written that on the driver’s side door of Ezra’s truck with white shoe polish the last day of school the year before. He didn’t know who, it could have been anybody really, but it had a way of coming back to him sometimes. Unexpectedly hitting him like a slap in the face. White shoe polish on shiny black finish.

  YUR MOM’S A SLUT!

  A dispassionate, critical part of him always wanted to ask, why not go that extra mile and spell it out right? It was just an O, for fuck’s sake.

  The shoe polish had ruined his paintjob and it had cost a ridiculous amount of money to have it fixed, but he’d done it. He had taken the car out of town to have it done though.

  The truth was, their dad had money. A lot of it. Lilia had left him, so she wouldn’t take it for herself or let him try to bribe his way back into her affections, but for the sake of her boys, she wouldn’t completely refuse it. Dad was Lou Sallis, not one of the FBI’s most wanted, but definitely a headache to the SFPD. A thorn in their side—and a jewel in their crown if they ever managed to pin him down. If that ever happened, they would discover that about 30% of all the powder lining the noses and veins of every junkie in the western half of the country led back to him. That was where the money came from.

  When Ezra had been about to start high school, Mom had finally had enough of Dad sticking his dick in strange young pussy, fathering bastards with half the women in the neighborhood, so they left San Francisco for someplace quiet. They had ended up in Iowa, a stone’s throw from the railroad that cut through the middle of a quiet, boring, hidebound little shithole.

  He hated it, but honestly, he wouldn’t have been taking a gun—among other things—to school if it were only about that. If it was just the shit about his mom or the fights that were a semi-regular occurrence for Isaac and himself or hating the town, he would have graduated and forgotten about it after he left the place. But it wasn’t.

  Isaac rocked to the side, jostling him. Ezra bumped him back. “What?”

  Isaac was smirking. “I hate Mondays,” he said.

  Ezra laughed. “Nobody likes Mondays.”

  At the heart of things, it was Mercy. At least for Ezra’s heart, it was Mercy. Isaac’s heart was a stranger, more mysterious breed of animal.

  The train finally came to an end. The last car had a pretty cool graffiti painting of an exploding volcano on the very back end. The barriers lifted, the lights stopped flashing and the cars that were backed up past their yard started to creep away.

  Ezra and Isaac watched the caravan of vehicles go by for a little while then Ezra lightly swatted Isaac’s leg, signaling him to come on, and pushed up from the hood of the car. Isaac grabbed his backpack and leaned in the open driver’s side window to turn the key, cutting off the radio. He put the key in his pocket and got into the cab of Ezra’s truck as he started it. Ezra lit a cigarette, smiling around the filter at the irony as he waited for his brother to fasten his seatbelt.

  Mercy and Corey lived in a nice two-storey house across town in a suburban neighborhood where all the neighbors watched Ezra like he was a stray cat they expected to back up and spray the curtains. It was no wonder why, really and he didn’t blame them. He was taller, darker, more conspicuous, and (as far as they knew) poorer than their own precious, corruptible offspring. To look at him, one might think he was capable of any manner of delinquency or so he had heard. Ezra knew he scared the hell out of most parents, which a lot of the time meant boys wanted to be liked by him and girls wanted to be with him. Mercy’s parents had had a similar negative reaction to him the first time she had badgered him into having dinner at her house. They got over it pretty quick, mostly thanks to her dad, who was a good guy in Ezra’s book—for a cop.

  “Gross. It’s purple,” Isaac observed.

  The summer before, Audra had hired a couple of neighborhood boys to paint the house. It wasn’t exactly purple, more a purplish-grey. Ezra had no idea what you’d call such a color, but it was ugly.

  Mercy and Corey came outside. He had a backpack and she was carrying a duffle bag and Don Rollins’s AR-15 rifle.

  “Whoa,” Isaac said when he saw it.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ezra muttered. He stuck his head out the window and whistled to her. “Hurry up. Someone’s gonna fucking see that shit and call the cops.”

  “My dad is the cops,” Corey said as he opened the passenger door and threw his bag in behind the seat.

  “Explain to me how that makes it better,” Ezra said.

  “Relax,” Mercy said. She walked over to his side of the truck, leaned on her elbows in the window and took his cigarette. “It’s funny the things people don’t question.”

  “That might be true, but I’d feel a lot better if you’d get that thing out of sight,” Ezra said.

  She smiled and leaned in the window to kiss him. When they broke apart, they remained there with their foreheads touching for a few seconds, breathing each others’ breath.

  “I’m not saying I love you or anything, but I think I like you a helluva lot,” Mercy whispered to him.

  It was something she said to him sometimes. He pretty much figured it meant “I love you,” no matter what she claimed to the contrary. Ezra smiled and pressed another kiss, quick like a punctuation mark, to her mouth and came away with the tingle of her peppermint lip balm on his lips.

  “Me too,” he said. “Now get in the damn truck with that gun before your nosey neighbors see it.”

  “Seriously,” Isaac agreed.

  Mercy took a drag off Ezra’s cigarette, gave it back to him and rounded the hood of the truck to get in. She ended up in the middle, crammed between Ezra and Corey. Isaac took the place against the door without a word and sat there stiffly with his bag clutched in his hands on his lap all the way to school. Of them all, Corey seemed to be the least concerned about what they were about to do, but Ezra reminded himself the kid had been through a lot.

  For some reason, he thought of the little grey and black bird cupped in his brother’s hands.

  Their school had security cameras and a security guard, a young guy named Robby Whitaker, but it wasn’t a big enough school to warrant metal detectors on every door and Robby wasn’t armed. The cameras were mostly located outside, pointed at the parking lot and the track and field in the back, but there were a couple in the hallways and inside the cafeteria. They and Robby were concessions to the idea of heavier security in schools that had evolved and gained popularity about the time school shootings and rampage killings had started making the news with bi-weekly regularity in 2013 and 2014. Parents worried about their children and they insisted something had to be done. Something had been done, but neither the cameras nor Robby Whitaker were taken very seriously.

  It wasn’t that kind of town. Things like that never happened here.

  They went around and ducked under the cameras out front. Inside, they found Robby Whitaker leaning in the doorway of the main office near the secretary, Sally Braunberger’s desk. His back was to the hallway, so when he felt the barrel of Isaac’s gun press into his side, he turned with a smile on his face to excuse himself and move out of his way. The smile slipped away slowly like it was melting when he looked into Isaac’s eyes, bright like little gemstones in the black ski mask.

  “What the hell—?”

  Mercy went around him into the office and pointed the big, scary rifle in Sally’s face. Her eyes behind her spectacles bugged and her hand darted automatically to the phone on her desk.

  “Don’t,” Mercy warned.

  “You don’t want to do that, Mrs. Braunberger,” I
saac said.

  Mercy glanced over at Corey and jerked her head in a nod for him to get out of there. He was supposed to go to class or rather, to be seen going to class.

  Corey was cuffing Robby’s hands behind his back with zip ties. “This isn’t about you,” he told Sally. “I kind of like you, actually.” He gave a handful of zip ties to Isaac and left, hefting his backpack onto his shoulder.

  “Yeah, you’re cool people, Sally,” Ezra said. “But…”

  He let the implication of the unfinished statement hang and walked behind the others to the door of the principal’s private office, which was closed. ALVIN MCGUINN PRINCIPAL it said on the black and gold nameplate on the door. He knocked and they all waited. Paper’s shuffling, the rough clearing of a throat. The door was yanked open and Mr. McGuinn peered up at Ezra with his little eyes pinched in displeasure. He had to see the mask, the gun, the people behind Ezra holding more guns on Sally and Robby, but for a moment he still had the look of a man about to give a boy a severe scolding. Then his face drained of color and he took a step backward into his office.

  “Ned, I think—” Mr. McGuinn started to say.

  Dr. Hunter the school shrink was sitting in the chair across from the principal’s desk. They had obviously been discussing something when Ezra interrupted them. He stood slowly as Ezra followed Mr. McGuinn into the office with his gun steady between his eyes.

  “Come toward me and go through the door into Sally’s office,” Ezra told Dr. Hunter.

  Ned Hunter straightened his slick grey jacket and didn’t move. “Young man,” he said, all rationality and reason, “what do you think you’re doing?”

  Ezra was surprised by his own quick laugh. “Dr. Hunter, you want to do what I say and not jerk me off right now. This isn’t a squirt gun.”

  Isaac poked his head in the office and silently gestured Dr. Hunter out with his own gun. Dr. Hunter complied, but he didn’t walk like a man afraid for his life. He seemed almost excited.

  “Get your keys,” Ezra told Mr. McGuinn.

  Mr. McGuinn hesitated and Ezra snatched the collar of his jacket up in one hand and put the gun up close to his face. Looking down the barrel into the black knit of Ezra’s face, he looked like he might vomit, but he nodded jerkily and scuttled to his desk when Ezra released him.

  He took the big ring of keys from a drawer and dropped them on the desk. There was a key for every lock on every door in the school on that ring. The janitor had a set just like it. One of these keys was to lock the fire doors that separated the rest of the school from the boiler room in case of a fire and the boiler room was off a short hallway that divided the gym from the rest of the building.

  Ezra picked them up and gestured with the gun for Mr. McGuinn to come around the desk and go out the same door Dr. Hunter had left through.

  “Why are you doing this?” Mr. McGuinn asked, backing out the door into the outer office.

  Ezra ignored him and shoved him toward Isaac. “His hands, too,” he told him.

  Mercy was on the other side of the desk with Sally telling her what she wanted the woman to say over the intercom. Sally’s face was wet with tears and snot, but her voice was nearly steady when she turned on the sound system to make the announcement: The assembly in the gym scheduled for later would now take place directly after first period. Students and staff were to make their way to the gymnasium when the bell rang.

  “What’s the assembly about?” Ezra asked.

  In the chair between Robby Whitaker and Mr. McGuinn, Dr. Hunter cleared his throat loudly. They looked at him. “In light of recent events,” he said, “we—that is, Mr. McGuinn and myself—thought it would be helpful and beneficial for the students and staff to… be better informed. It’s an assembly about bullying, the object of which is to open a dialog with—”

  Isaac snorted and swatted the back of Dr. Hunter’s head. “Shut up.”

  “Young man—”

  Isaac bent over him and put the barrel of his handgun under the man’s chin. Dr. Hunter stiffened and looked around wildly, all of his excitement and arrogance gone under a curtain of sudden fear. It was finally hitting him: the cold muzzle of the gun against the razor burn on his chin, the current of violence on low hum all around him. This was really happening.

  “I said, shut up,” Isaac hissed. He shoved Dr. Hunter’s head back with the end of the barrel before pointing the gun away from him.

  “Why don’t you take these and lock the doors,” Ezra said, giving Isaac the keys. “We don’t want anyone wandering in here when the bell rings.”

  Isaac put his gun under his belt and turned to do it.

  Sally Braunberger suddenly shoved Mercy and leapt up from her cowering position behind the desk. Mercy fell back a few steps and Sally shot by Isaac out the door into the hallway before any of them could catch her. She tripped on the rug outside, caught herself and was running for the exit when Isaac stepped out into the hallway and raised his gun.

  Lou Sallis hadn’t bought his sons 9mm handguns without making sure they knew how to use them. Isaac could shoot. If Sally had been a moving target at three times the distance, he could have hit her. Targets were not people, but Isaac looked determined. He put the sight right between her shoulders, breathed out and started to squeeze the trigger.

  Ezra stepped up to him, put a hand on the gun and pushed it down. “Don’t. Let her go,” he said.

  “Why?” Isaac asked. “She’ll tell.”

  “Yeah and that sucks, but if you shoot her, everyone’s gonna hear it,” Ezra said.

  Isaac considered this. “And everyone will know something’s wrong,” he said.

  “And we don’t want that,” Ezra said.

  “No.” They watched Sally Braunberger hit the double doors that would take her outside and disappear. The doors closed slowly behind her. Isaac said, “Shit.”

  They went back into the office and locked the doors. A minute later, the bell rang and the hallway outside filled with kids going to the gym and teachers shouting directions.

  Molina

  A Wild One Anyway

  Homeroom was Miss Tolstad. Miss Tolstad of the trendy harlequin glasses. Miss Tolstad of the perfect too-white teeth. Miss Tolstad who looked like what Barbie would look like if she was real and smart and stuffed into tailored slacks and blouses with plunging necklines. Miss Tolstad told her students to call her Jenny and pretended not to notice the boys looking down her shirt when she leaned over to help them figure out how to solve for x.

  Molina liked Miss Tolstad. She was nice, she just wasn’t a very good teacher. It was too important to her for everyone to like her, and Molina was pretty sure she didn’t know the value of x herself most of the time without checking the answer in her teachers’ edition textbook.

  It made sense. Most everyone wanted to be liked.

  Because she was nice and she told her students to call her Jenny and because the school counselor, Dr. Hunter—who also told everyone to call him Ned—gave her the creeps, Molina had been thinking about confiding in her. It seemed like she might understand. She wasn’t old like a lot of the teachers. She was young and pretty, fresh from college. She sometimes talked about how she had become a teacher because she wanted to help people. Then she would laugh like she was embarrassed by her own honesty.

  Some days Molina didn’t feel much of anything. She was like the sheets her mother hung out on the line to dry in summer; thin, empty, flapping in the breeze.

  Why don’t you wear something pretty today?

  Her mother had started to realize that her pretty, happy, popular girl was “a little down in the dumps” lately. She didn’t laugh very much, didn’t go out anymore and she had traded in her baby doll Ts, wedge heels, skinny jeans and the blouses that made her boobs look great for baggy sweaters, long-sleeved shirts and pants that hid all of her curves.

  Honey, are you okay?

  It had only taken her mom two months to notice.

  Her dad might have noticed, but like most thi
ngs concerning his daughter, he remained silent and waited for her mother to handle it. Molina always got the impression that her dad was puzzled by her, like he wasn’t quite sure how she had happened or what he was expected to do about it.

  Are you sure you’re all right?

  She wasn’t. There were days when she felt like she was going to explode. Scream and scream and scream forever until her throat filled with blood and she died. Those were the days she almost forgot what she knew about her parents and almost, almost told them.

  She would catch herself with her mouth open, her tongue ready to betray her, then she would picture her mom reading the paper at the breakfast table, telling her dad that the little Dunkirk girl had run off with some boy from the city. Her friend Martha Allan had told her. Martha was a big-mouthed old bag. A gossip. All rivers of local news, big and small, converged and flowed through her. When it turned out that Emily Dunkirk, fifteen year old daughter of Pat and Everett Dunkirk, had been abducted, raped, strangled and left in a ditch along the highway, Molina’s mother said that Dunkirk girl had always been a wild one anyway. Her dad just grunted and changed the subject.

  She always was a wild one anyway.

  A wild one.

  Anyway.

  A sniff of disapproval. Poor raped, dead Emily Dunkirk had exceeded no one’s expectations. Molina had only been twelve at the time, but she remembered it. The look on her mother’s face when she talked about it hadn’t been pity or outrage or sadness. There had been a mean and petty gleam of pleasure in her soft brown eyes.

  She couldn’t tell her mother. She had realized that very morning that she couldn’t tell Miss Tolstad either. Miss Tolstad who liked to be liked by everyone. She would want to help. She might tell. If she told, it would get out; if it got out then everyone would know and there would be no saving herself.